The Unbearable Weight of the Wayback Machine #

There's a saying: "Once you post something online, it is there forever." I've generally agreed with this saying, and acted accordingly - taking care not to share very much of my personal information online. But I only recently realized the true weight of this statement.

Forever.

What are the consequences of this? It's not just: "oh, I posted an embarrassing photo, now my employer can see it and I can't take it down." It's more like - "once I write something online, it will be added to a Digital Heap that will likely be publicly available long after I am dead." This heap primarily takes the form of the Wayback Machine, but it also takes the form of the current worldwide web, saved files on hard drives, trained models, blockchains. It is distributed enough that it would be very difficult to remove items from - but adding items is easy.

Now, I generally don't give much weight to the concept of infohazards - in my opinion, concealing information often does as much harm as it does good. But if there is information that you aren't ok with existing forever (forever!) - you should NOT post it online.

"Real life" is different. Yes, there are things humans do with long term impacts, or things that bleed into the online space whether humans like it or not. But the vast majority of human lives are not recorded (publicly), and will be forgotten in due time. For me, that is a major relief. Not because I want people to forget my mistakes, but rather, because I'm daunted by the incredible weight of knowing that every word I write will exist in a public forum, indefinitely. If you're reading this post, it has been added to the heap! (And if you're reading it from the Wayback machine, you get double points).

So, why am I writing anything if I feel this daunted? Mostly because, I have a (healthy, in my opinion) skepticism around my own ability to predict the very-long-term consequences of my actions. So if I write something today, and someone in 5 years digs it up and says "she was wrong!" or an evil LLM gets trained on it or something - so be it. I'm more confident in my prediction that I will not feel regret in these futures. Perhaps this is selfish, but what can I say, I can be selfish sometimes.